Lymphocytes are found in various organs of the body in vertebrates, and are part of the immune system. They attack foreign bodies, and in instances of cells that have been infected with a virus, they attack the body's own cells. But, Lymphocytes can become cancerous and cause a cancer known both as Lymphoma or Lymphosarcoma. Since lymphocytes are found in multiple organs, cancerous lymphocytes may develop a tumor in a variety of organs.
In cats, where lymphoma is a common cancer, diagnosing Lymphoma is problematic, due to the fact that the symptoms may vary depending on the affected organ. For instance, the symptoms that develop as a result of Lymphoma in cats such as loss of appetite, weight loss, vomiting and diarrhea, that are also typically indicative of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Relying on these symptoms alone may lead to a miss-diagnosis of IBD, when the real underlying disease is Lymphoma.
Consequently, mistakenly diagnosing IBD instead of Lymphoma may lead to treatments that typically involve using steroids (e.g., Prednisone). The steroid treatment, although appears to relieve the symptoms, promotes the progression of cancerous cells, thus complicating the detection of the true cause of the symptoms (i.e., lymphoma), and later treatment of lymphoma.
The existing approach to detecting lymphoma is through a histological investigation, which involves a biopsy i.e., a surgical procedure to collect tissue, and testing to detect the presence of cancerous cells. A laboratory test may be, however, too costly, and may only be carried out at a late stage of the diagnosis elimination process i.e. after other conditions have been ruled out. As consequence, the delay caused by going through the diagnostic stages until a trial diagnosis of lymphoma is conducted, may be detrimental to the success rate of the treatment of the cancer once it has been established.
Therefore, what is needed is a method and system that allows a practitioner to detect, with a high probability, the presence of lymphoma in cats in order to guide further diagnoses of the disease, thus reducing the cost through avoidance of conducting multiple diagnoses, preventing miss-diagnoses which may lead to treatments, which may worsen the cancerous condition, and allow for an early diagnosis of lymphoma, before further growth and/or formation of metastases, which may be highly beneficial to the success rate of the cancer treatment once cancer has been established.